_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
VILLA RUBEIN, and Other Stories
THE ISLAND PHARISEES
THE MAN OF PROPERTY
THE COUNTRY HOUSE
FRATERNITY
THE PATRICIAN
THE DARK FLOWER
THE FREELANDS
BEYOND
FIVE TALES
SAINT’S PROGRESS
* * * * *
A COMMENTARY
A MOTLEY
THE INN OF TRANQUILLITY
THE LITTLE MAN, and Other Satires
A SHEAF
ANOTHER SHEAF
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA: 1919
* * * * *
PLAYS: FIRST SERIES _and Separately_
THE SILVER BOX
JOY
STRIFE
PLAYS: SECOND SERIES _and Separately_
THE ELDEST SON
THE LITTLE DREAM
JUSTICE
PLAYS: THIRD SERIES _and Separately_
THE FUGITIVE
THE PIGEON
THE MOB
A BIT O’ LOVE
* * * * *
MOODS, SONGS, AND DOGGERELS
MEMORIES. Illustrated
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA
1919
[Illustration:
_From a photograph, copyright, 1919, by Eugene Hutchinson._
John Galsworthy]
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA
1919
BY
JOHN GALSWORTHY
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1919
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published August, 1919
[Illustration]
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY 1
II. AMERICAN AND BRITON 11
III. FROM A SPEECH AT THE LOTUS CLUB, NEW YORK 45
IV. FROM A SPEECH TO THE SOCIETY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES,
NEW YORK 51
V. ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 54
VI. TO THE LEAGUE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION, NEW YORK 67
VII. TALKING AT LARGE 73
ADDRESSES IN AMERICA
1919
I
AT THE LOWELL CENTENARY
We celebrate to-night the memory of a great man of Letters. What strikes
me most about that glorious group of New England writers――Emerson and
Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, Thoreau, Motley, Holmes, and Lowell――is
a certain measure and magnanimity. They were rare men and fine writers,
of a temper simple and unafraid.
I confess to thinking more of James Russell Lowell as a critic and
master of prose than as a poet. His single-hearted enthusiasm for
Letters had a glowing quality which made it a guiding star for the
frail barque of culture. His humour, breadth of view, sagacity, and the
all-round character of his activities has hardly been equalled in your
country. Not so great a thinker or poet as Emerson, not so creative as
Hawthorne, so original in philosophy and life as Thoreau, so racy and
quaint as Holmes, he ran the gamut of those qualities as none of the
others did; and as critic and analyst of literature surpassed them all.
But I cannot hope to add anything of value to American estimate and
praise of Lowell――critic, humorist, poet, editor, reformer, man of
Letters, man of State affairs. I may, perhaps, be permitted however to
remind you of two sayings of his: “I am never lifted up to any peak of
vision――but that when I look down in hope to see some valley of the
Beautiful Mountains I behold nothing but blackened ruins, and the moans
of the down-trodden the world over.... Then it seems as if my heart
would break in pouring out one glorious song that should be the Gospel
of Reform, full of consolation and strength to the oppressed――that
way my madness lies.” That was one side of the youthful Lowell, the
generous righter of wrongs, the man. And this other saying: “The
English-speaking nations should build a monument to the misguided
enthusiasts of the plains of Shinar, for as the mixture of many bloods
seems to have made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the
mingling of divers speeches given them a language which is perhaps
the noblest vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed.” That was the
other side of Lowell, the enthusiast for Letters; and that the feeling
he had about our language.
I am wondering, indeed, Mr. President, what those men who in the
fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth centuries were welding the English
language would think if they could visit this hall to-night, if
suddenly we saw them sitting here among us in their monkish dress,
their homespun, or their bright armour, having come from a greater Land
even than America――the Land of the Far Shades. What expression should
we see on the dim faces of them, the while they took in the marvellous
fact that the instrument of speech they forged in the cottages,
courts, cloisters, and castles of their little misty island had become
the living speech of half the world, and the second tongue for all
the nations of the other half! For even so it is now――this English
language, which they made, and Shakespeare crowned, which you speak and
we speak, and men speak under the Southern Cross, and unto the Arctic
Seas!
I do not think that you Americans and we English are any longer
strikingly alike in physical type or general characteristics, no
more than I think there is much resemblance between yourselves and
the Australians. Our link is now but community of language――_and the
infinity which this connotes_.
Perfected language――and ours and yours had come to flower before white
men began to seek these shores――is so much more than a medium through
which to exchange material commodities; it is cement of the spirit,
mortar linking the bricks of our thoughts into a single structure of
ideals and laws, painted and carved with the rarities of our fancy, the
manifold forms of Beauty and Truth. We who speak American and you who
speak English are conscious of a community which no differences can
take from us. Perhaps the very greatest result of the grim years we
have just been passing through is the promotion of our common tongue
to the position of the universal language. The importance of the
English-speaking peoples is now such that the educated man in every
country will perforce, as it were, acquire a knowledge of our speech.
The second-language problem, in my judgment, has been solved. Numbers,
and geographical and political accident have decided a question which
I think will never seriously be reopened, unless madness descends on
us and we speakers of English fight among ourselves. That fate I, at
least, cannot see haunting the future.
Lowell says in one of his earlier writings: “We are the furthest
from wishing to see what many are so ardently praying for, namely,
a National Literature; for the same mighty lyre of the human heart
answers the touch of the master in all ages and in every clime, and any
literature in so far as it is national is diseased in so much as it
appeals to some climatic peculiarity rather than to universal nature.”
That is very true, but good fortune has now made of our English speech
a medium of _internationality_.
Henceforth you and we are the inhabitants and guardians of a great
Spirit-City, to which the whole world will make pilgrimage. They will
make that pilgrimage primarily because our City is a market-place.
It will be for us to see that they who come to trade remain to
worship. What is it we seek in this motley of our lives, to what end
do we ply the multifarious traffic of civilisation? Is it that we
may become rich and satisfy a material caprice ever growing with the
opportunity of satisfaction? Is it that we may, of set and conscious
purpose, always be getting the better of one another? Is it even,
that of no sort of conscious purpose we may pound the roads of life
at top speed, and blindly use up our little energies? I cannot think
so. Surely, in dim sort we are trying to realise human happiness,
trying to reach a far-off goal of health and kindliness and beauty;
trying to live so that those qualities which make us human beings――the
sense of proportion, the feeling for beauty, pity, and the sense of
humour――should be ever more exalted above the habits and passions that
we share with the tiger, the ostrich, and the ape.
And so I would ask what will become of all our reconstruction in
these days if it be informed and guided solely by the spirit of the
market-place? Do Trade, material prosperity, and the abundance
of creature comforts guarantee that we advance towards our real
goal? Material comfort in abundance is no bad thing; I confess to a
considerable regard for it. But for true progress it is but a flighty
consort. I can well see the wreckage from the world-storm completely
cleared away, the fields of life ploughed and manured, and yet no wheat
grown there which can feed the spirit of man, and help its stature.
Lest we suffer such a disillusion as that, what powers and influence
can we exert? There is one at least: The proper and exalted use of this
great and splendid instrument, our common language. In a sophisticated
world speech is action, words are deeds; we cannot watch our winged
words too closely. Let us at least make our language the instrument of
Truth; prune it of lies and extravagance, of perversions and all the
calculated battery of partizanship; train ourselves to such sobriety of
speech, and penmanship, that we come to be trusted at home and abroad;
so making our language the medium of honesty and fair-play, that
meanness, violence, sentimentality, and self-seeking become strangers
in our Lands. Great and evil is the power of the lie, of the violent
saying, and the calculated appeal to base or dangerous motive; let us,
then, make them fugitives among us, outcast from our speech!
I have often thought during these past years what an ironical eye
Providence must have been turning on National Propaganda――on all the
disingenuous breath which has been issued to order, and all those miles
of patriotic writings dutifully produced in each country, to prove to
other countries that they are its inferiors! A very little wind will
blow those ephemeral sheets into the limbo of thin air. Already they
are decomposing, soon they will be dust. To my thinking there are but
two forms of National Propaganda, two sorts of evidence of a country’s
worth, which defy the cross-examination of Time: The first and most
important is the rectitude and magnanimity of a Country’s conduct; its
determination not to take advantage of the weakness of other countries,
nor to tolerate tyranny within its own borders. And the other lasting
form of Propaganda is the work of the thinker and the artist, of men
whose unbidden, unfettered hearts are set on the expression of Truth
and Beauty as best they can perceive them. Such Propaganda the old
Greeks left behind them, to the imperishable glory of their Land.
By such Propaganda Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch; Dante, St. Francis;
Cervantes, Spinoza; Montaigne, Racine; Chaucer, Shakespeare; Goethe,
Kant; Turgenev, Tolstoi; Emerson, Lowell――a thousand and one more, have
exalted their countries in the sight of all, and advanced the stature
of mankind.
You may have noticed in life that when we assure others of our virtue
and the extreme rectitude of our conduct, we make on them but a sorry
impression. If on the other hand we chance to perform some just act
or kindness, of which they hear, or to produce a beautiful work which
they can see, we become exalted in their estimation though we did not
seek to be. And so it is with Countries. They may proclaim their powers
from the housetops――they will but convince the wind; but let their
acts be just, their temper humane, the speech and writings of their
peoples sober, the work of their thinkers and their artists true and
beautiful――and those Countries shall be sought after and esteemed.
We, who possess in common the English language――“best result of the
confusion of tongues” Lowell called it――that most superb instrument
for the making of word-music, for the telling of the truth, and the
expression of the imagination, may well remember this: That, in the use
we make of it, in the breadth, justice, and humanity of our thoughts,
the vigour, restraint, clarity, and beauty of the setting we give to
them, we have our greatest chance to make our Countries lovely and
beloved, to further the happiness of mankind, and to keep immortal the
priceless comradeship between us.
II
AMERICAN AND BRITON
On the mutual understanding of each other by Americans and Britons, the
future happiness of nations depends more than on any other world cause.
Ignorance in Central Europe of the nature of American and Englishman
tipped the balance in favour of war; and the course of the future will
surely be improved by right comprehension of their characters.
Well, I know something at least of the Englishman, who represents
four-fifths of the population of the British Isles.
And, first, there exists no more unconsciously deceptive person on
the face of the globe. The Englishman does not know himself; outside
England he is only guessed at.
Racially the Englishman is so complex and so old a blend that no one
can say precisely what he is. In character he is just as complex.
Physically, there are two main types; one inclining to length of limb,
bony jaws, and narrowness of face and head (you will nowhere see such
long and narrow heads as in our island); the other approximating more
to the legendary John Bull. The first type is gaining on the second.
There is little or no difference in the main mental character behind
these two.
In attempting to understand the real nature of the Englishman, certain
salient facts must be borne in mind.
THE SEA. To be surrounded generation after generation by the sea has
developed in him a suppressed idealism, a peculiar impermeability, a
turn for adventure, a faculty for wandering, and for being sufficient
unto himself in far and awkward surroundings.
THE CLIMATE. Whoso weathers for centuries a climate that, though
healthy and never extreme, is, perhaps, the least reliable and one of
the wettest in the world, must needs grow in himself a counterbalance
of dry philosophy, a defiant humour, an enforced medium temperature of
soul. The Englishman is no more given to extremes than his climate; and
against its damp and perpetual changes he has become coated with a sort
of protective bluntness.
THE POLITICAL AGE OF HIS COUNTRY. This is by far the oldest settled
Western power politically speaking. For 850 years England has known
no serious military incursion from without; for nearly 200 years she
has known no serious political turmoil within. This is partly the
outcome of her isolation, partly the happy accident of her political
constitution, partly the result of the Englishman’s habit of looking
before he leaps, which comes, no doubt, from the climate and the
mixture of his blood. This political stability has been a tremendous
factor in the formation of English character, has given the Englishman
of all ranks a certain deep, quiet sense of form and order, an
ingrained culture which makes no show, being in the bones of the man as
it were.
THE GREAT PREPONDERANCE FOR SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF TOWN OVER COUNTRY
LIFE. Taken in conjunction with generations of political stability,
this is the main cause of a growing, inarticulate humaneness, of which
however the Englishman appears to be rather ashamed.
The other chief factors have been:
THE ENGLISH PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
THE ESSENTIAL DEMOCRACY OF THE GOVERNMENT.
THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND THE PRESS (at present rather under a cloud).
THE OLD-TIME FREEDOM FROM COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE.
All these, the outcome of the quiet and stable home life of an island
people, have helped to make the Englishman a deceptive personality to
the outside eye. He has for centuries been licensed to grumble. There
is no such confirmed grumbler――until he really has something to grumble
at; and then, no one perhaps who grumbles less. An English soldier was
sitting in a trench, in the act of lighting his pipe, when a shell
burst close by, and lifted him bodily some yards away. He picked
himself up, bruised and shaken, and went on lighting his pipe, with the
words: “These French matches aren’t ’alf rotten.”
Confirmed carper though the Englishman is at the condition of his
country, no one perhaps is so profoundly convinced that it is the best
in the world. A stranger might well think from his utterances that
he was spoiled by the freedom of his life, unprepared to sacrifice
anything for a land in such a condition. If that country be threatened,
and with it his liberty, you find that his grumbles have meant less
than nothing. You find, too, that behind the apparent slackness of
every arrangement and every individual, are powers of adaptability to
facts, elasticity, practical genius, a spirit of competition amounting
almost to disease, and great determination. Before this war began, it
was the fashion among a number of English to lament the decadence of
their race. Such lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside
ear, were just English grumbles. All this democratic grumbling, and
habit of “going as you please,” serve a deep purpose. Autocracy,
censorship, compulsion destroy the salt in a nation’s blood, and
elasticity in its fibre; they cut at the very mainsprings of a nation’s
vitality. Only if reasonably free from control can a man really arrive
at what is or is not national necessity and truly identify himself with
a national ideal, by simple conviction from within.
Two words of caution to strangers trying to form an estimate of
the Englishman: He must not be judged from his Press, which, manned
(with certain exceptions) by those who are not typically English,
is too hectic to illustrate the true English spirit; nor can he be
judged entirely from his literature. The Englishman is essentially
inexpressive, unexpressed; and his literary men have been for the most
part sports――Nature’s attempt to redress the balance. Further, he
must not be judged by the evidence of his wealth. England may be the
richest country in the world in proportion to its population, but not
ten per cent of that population have any wealth to speak of, certainly
not enough to have affected their hardihood; and, with few exceptions,
those who have enough wealth are brought up to worship hardihood.
I have never held a whole-hearted brief for the British character.
There is a lot of good in it, but much which is repellent. It has a
kind of deliberate unattractiveness, setting out on its journey with
the words: “Take me or leave me.” One may respect a person of this
sort, but it’s difficult either to know or to like him. An American
officer said recently to a British Staff Officer in a friendly voice:
“So we’re going to clean up Brother Boche together!” and the British
Staff Officer replied: “Really!” No wonder Americans sometimes say:
“I’ve got no use for those fellows!”
The world is consecrate to strangeness and discovery, and the attitude
of mind concreted in that: “Really!” seems unforgivable till one
remembers that it is _manner rather than matter_ which divides the
hearts of American and Briton.
In your huge, still half-developed country, where every kind of
national type and habit comes to run a new thread into the rich
tapestry of American life and thought, people must find it almost
impossible to conceive the life of a little old island where traditions
persist generation after generation without anything to break them
up; where blood remains undoctored by new strains; demeanour becomes
crystallised for lack of contrasts; and manner gets set like a
plaster mask. Nevertheless the English manner of to-day, of what are
called the classes, is the growth of only a century or so. There was
probably nothing at all like it in the days of Elizabeth or even of
Charles II. The English manner was still racy not to say rude when
the inhabitants of Virginia, as we are told, sent over to ask that
there might be despatched to them some hierarchical assistance for
the good of their souls, and were answered: “D――――n your souls, grow
tobacco!” The English manner of to-day could not even have come into
its own when that epitaph of a Lady, quoted somewhere by Gilbert
Murray, was written: “Bland, passionate, and deeply religious, she
was second cousin to the Earl of Leitrim; of such are the Kingdom of
Heaven.” About that gravestone motto you will admit there was a certain
lack of self-consciousness; that element which is now the foremost
characteristic of the English manner.
But this English self-consciousness is no mere fluffy gaucherie; it
is our special form of what Germans would call “Kultur.” Behind every
manifestation of thought or emotion, the Briton retains control of
self, and is thinking: “That’s all I’ll let myself feel; at all events
all I’ll let myself show.” This stoicism is good in its refusal to be
foundered; bad in that it fosters a narrow outlook; starves emotion,
spontaneity, and frank sympathy; destroys grace and what one may
describe roughly as the lovable side of personality. The English hardly
ever say just what comes into their heads. What we call “good form,”
the unwritten law which governs certain classes of the Briton, savours
of the dull and glacial; but there lurks within it a core of virtue. It
has grown up like callous shell round two fine ideals――suppression of
the ego lest it trample on the corns of other people; and exaltation of
the maxim: ‘Deeds before words.’ Good form, like any other religion,
starts well with some ethical truth, but in due time gets commonised,
twisted, and petrified till at last we can hardly trace its origin, and
watch with surprise its denial and contradiction of the root idea.
Without doubt, before the war, good form had become a kind of disease
in England. A French friend told me how he witnessed in a Swiss Hotel
the meeting between an Englishwoman and her son, whom she had not
seen for two years; she was greatly affected――by the fact that he had
not brought a dinner-jacket. The best manners are no “manners,” or at
all events no mannerisms; but many Britons who have even attained to
this perfect purity are yet not free from the paralytic effects of
“good form”; are still self-conscious in the depths of their souls,
and never do or say a thing without trying not to show how much they
are feeling. All this guarantees perhaps a certain decency in life;
but in intimate intercourse with people of other nations who have not
this particular cult of suppression, we English disappoint, and jar,
and often irritate. Nations have their differing forms of snobbery.
At one time, if we are to believe Thackeray, the English all wanted
to be second cousins to the Earl of Leitrim, like that lady bland and
passionate. Now-a-days it is not so simple. The Earl of Leitrim has
become etherialised. We no longer care how a fellow is born, so long
as he behaves as the Earl of Leitrim would have; never makes himself
conspicuous or ridiculous, never shows too much what he’s really
feeling, never talks of what he’s going to do, and always “plays the
game.” The cult is centred in our Public Schools and Universities.
At a very typical and honoured old Public School, he to whom you are
listening passed on the whole a happy time; but what an odd life
educationally speaking! We lived rather like young Spartans; and were
not encouraged to think, imagine, or see anything we learned, in
relation to life at large. It’s very difficult to teach boys, because
their chief object is not to be taught anything; but I should say we
were crammed, not taught. Living as we did the herd-life of boys with
little or no intrusion from our elders, and they men who had been
brought up in the same way as ourselves, we were debarred from any real
interest in philosophy, history, art, literature, and music, or any
advancing notions in social life or politics. We were reactionaries
almost to a boy. I remember one summer term Gladstone came down to
speak to us, and we repaired to the Speech Room with white collars and
dark hearts, muttering what we would do to that Grand Old Man if we
could have our way. But, after all, he contrived to charm us. Boys
are not difficult to charm. In that queer life we had all sorts of
unwritten rules of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must
not go out with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted
forward; you must not walk more than two abreast till you reached a
certain form; nor be enthusiastic about anything, except such a supreme
matter as a drive over the pavilion at cricket, or a run the whole
length of the ground at football. You must not talk about yourself
or your home people; and for any punishment you must assume complete
indifference.
I dwell on these trivialities, because every year thousands of British
boys enter these mills which grind exceeding small; and because these
boys constitute in after life the great majority of the official,
military, academic, professional, and a considerable proportion of
the business classes of Great Britain. They become the Englishmen
who say: “Really!” and they are for the most part the Englishmen who
travel and reach America. The great defence I have always heard put
up for our Public Schools is that they form character. As oatmeal is
supposed to form bone in the bodies of Scotsmen, so our Public Schools
are supposed to form good sound moral fibre in British boys. And there
is much in this plea. The life does make boys enduring, self-reliant,
good-tempered, and honourable, but it most carefully endeavours to
destroy all original sin of individuality, spontaneity, and engaging
freakishness. It implants, moreover, in the great majority of those who
have lived it the mental attitude of that swell, who when asked where
he went for his hats, replied: “Blank’s; is there another fellow’s?”
To know all is to excuse all――to know all about the bringing-up of
English Public School boys makes one excuse much. The atmosphere and
tradition of those places is extraordinarily strong, and persists
through all modern changes. Thirty-eight years have gone since I was a
new boy, but cross-examining a young nephew who left not long ago, I
found almost precisely the same features and conditions. The War, which
has changed so much of our social life, will have some, but no very
great, effect on this particular institution. The boys still go there
from the same kind of homes and preparatory schools and come under the
same kind of masters. And the traditional unemotionalism, the cult of
a dry and narrow stoicism, is rather fortified than diminished by the
times we live in.
Our Universities, on the other hand, have lately been but the ghosts of
their old selves. At my old College in Oxford last year they had only
two English students. In the Chapel under the Joshua Reynolds window,
through which the sun was shining, hung a long “roll of honour,” a
hundred names and more. In the College garden an open-air hospital was
ranged under the old City wall, where we used to climb and go wandering
in the early summer mornings after some all-night spree. Down on the
river the empty College barges lay stripped and stark. From the top of
one of them an aged custodian broke into words: “Ah! Oxford’ll never
be the same again in my time. Why, who’s to teach ’em rowin’? When we
do get undergrads again, who’s to teach ’em? All the old ones gone,
killed, wounded and that. No! Rowin’ll never be the same again――not in
my time.” That was _the_ tragedy of the War for him. Our Universities
will recover faster than he thinks, and resume the care of our
particular ‘Kultur,’ and cap the products of our public schools with
the Oxford accent and the Oxford manner.
An acute critic tells me that Americans hearing such deprecatory words
as these from an Englishman about his country’s institutions would say
that this is precisely an instance of what an American means by the
Oxford manner. Americans whose attitude towards their own country seems
to be that of a lover to his lady or a child to its mother, cannot――he
says――understand how Englishmen can be critical of their own country,
and yet love her. Well, the Englishman’s attitude to his country is
that of a man to himself; and the way he runs her down is rather a
part of that special English bone-deep self-consciousness of which I
have been speaking. Englishmen (the speaker amongst them) love their
Country as much as the French love France, and the Americans America;
but she is so much a part of us that to speak well of her is like
speaking well of ourselves, which we have been brought up to regard
as impossible. When Americans hear Englishmen speaking critically of
their own country I think they should note it for a sign of complete
identification with their country rather than of detachment from it.
But to return to English Universities: They have, on the whole, a
broadening influence on the material which comes to them so set and
narrow. They do a little to discover for their children that there are
many points of view, and much which needs an open mind in this world.
They have not precisely a democratic influence, but taken by themselves
they would not be inimical to democracy. And when the War is over
they will surely be still broader in philosophy and teaching. Heaven
forefend that we should see vanish all that is old, all that has as it
were the virginia-creeper, the wistaria bloom of age upon it; there is
a beauty in age and a health in tradition, ill dispensed with. But what
is hateful in age is its lack of understanding and of sympathy; in a
word――its intolerance. Let us hope this wind of change may sweep out
and sweeten the old places of my country, sweep away the cobwebs and
the dust, our narrow ways of thought, our mannikinisms. But those who
hate intolerance dare not be intolerant with the foibles of age; they
should rather see them as comic, and gently laugh them out.
The educated Briton may be self-sufficient, but he has grit; and at
bottom grit is, I fancy, what Americans at any rate appreciate more
than anything. If the motto of my old Oxford College: “Manners makyth
man,” were true, I should often be sorry for the Briton. But his
manners don’t make him, they mar him. His goods are all absent from
the shop window; he is not a man of the world in the wider meaning
of that expression. And there is, of course, a particularly noxious
type of travelling Briton, who does his best, unconsciously, to take
the bloom off his country wherever he goes. Selfish, coarse-fibred,
loud-voiced――the sort which thanks God he is a Briton――I suppose
because nobody else will do it for him!
We live in times when patriotism is exalted above all other virtues,
because there have happened to lie before the patriotic tremendous
chances for the display of courage and self-sacrifice. Patriotism ever
has that advantage as the world is now constituted; but patriotism and
provincialism of course are pretty close relations, and they who can
only see beauty in the plumage of their own kind, who prefer the bad
points of their countrymen to the good points of foreigners, merely
write themselves down blind of an eye, and panderers to herd feeling.
America is advantaged in this matter. She lives so far away from other
nations that she might well be excused for thinking herself the only
country in the world; but in the many strains of blood which go to make
up America, there is as yet a natural corrective to the narrower kind
of patriotism. America has vast spaces and many varieties of type and
climate, and life to her is still a great adventure.
I pretend to no proper knowledge of the American people. It takes
more than two visits of two months each to know the American
people; there is just one thing, however, I can tell you: You seem
easy, but are difficult to know. Americans have their own form of
self-absorption; but they appear to be free as yet from the special
competitive self-centrement which has been forced on Britons through
long centuries by countless continental rivalries and wars. Insularity
was driven into the very bones of our people by the generation-long
wars of Napoleon. A Frenchman, André Chevrillon, whose book: “England
and the War” I commend to anyone who wishes to understand British
peculiarities, justly, subtly studied by a Frenchman, used these words
in a recent letter to me: “You English are so strange to us French;
you are so utterly different from any other people in the world.”
It is true; we are a lonely race. Deep in our hearts, I think, we
feel that only the American people could ever really understand us.
And being extraordinarily self-conscious, perverse, and proud, we do
our best to hide from Americans that we have any such feeling. It
would distress the average Briton to confess that he wanted to be
understood, had anything so natural as a craving for fellowship or for
being liked. We are a weird people, though we look so commonplace. In
looking at photographs of British types among photographs of other
European nationalities, one is struck at once by something which is
in no other of those races――exactly as if we had an extra skin; as
if the British animal had been tamed longer than the rest. And so he
has. His political, social, legal life was fixed long before that of
any other Western country. He was old before the _Mayflower_ touched
American shores and brought there avatars, grave and civilised as ever
founded nation. There is something touching and terrifying about our
character, about the depth at which it keeps its real yearnings, about
the perversity with which it disguises them, and its inability to show
its feelings. We are, deep down, under all our lazy mentality, the most
combative and competitive race in the world, with the exception perhaps
of the American. This is at once a spiritual link with America, and
yet one of the great barriers to friendship between the two peoples.
Whether we are better than Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Italians,
Chinese, or any other race, is of course more than a question; but
those peoples are all so different from us that we are bound, I
suppose, secretly to consider ourselves superior. But between Americans
and ourselves under all differences there is some mysterious deep
kinship which causes us to doubt, and makes us irritable, as if we
were continually being tickled by that question: Now am I really a
better man than he? Exactly what proportion of American blood at this
time of day is British, I know not; but enough to make us definitely
cousins――always an awkward relationship. We see in Americans a sort
of image of ourselves; feel near enough, yet far enough, to criticise
and carp at the points of difference. It is as though a man went out
and encountered, in the street, what he thought for the moment was
himself; and, decidedly disturbed in his self-love, instantly began to
disparage the appearance of that fellow. Probably community of language
rather than of blood accounts for our sense of kinship, for a common
means of expression cannot but mould thought and feeling into some
kind of unity. Certainly one can hardly overrate the intimacy which a
common literature brings. The lives of great Americans, Washington and
Franklin, Lincoln and Lee and Grant are unsealed for us, just as to
Americans are the lives of Marlborough and Nelson, Pitt and Gladstone,
and Gordon. Longfellow and Whittier and Whitman can be read by the
British child as simply as Burns and Shelley and Keats. Emerson and
William James are no more difficult to us than Darwin and Spencer to
Americans. Without an effort we rejoice in Hawthorne and Mark Twain,
Henry James and Howells, as Americans can in Dickens and Thackeray,
Meredith and Thomas Hardy. And, more than all, Americans own with
ourselves all literature in the English tongue before the _Mayflower_
sailed; Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and
the authors of the English Bible Version are their spiritual ancestors
as much as ever they are ours. The tie of language is all-powerful――for
language is the food formative of minds. Why! a volume could be written
on the formation of character by literary humour alone. It has, I am
sure, had a say in planting in American and Briton, especially the
British townsman, a kind of bone-deep defiance of Fate, a readiness
for anything which may turn up, a dry, wry smile under the blackest
sky, an individual way of looking at things, which nothing can shake.
Americans and Britons both, we must and will think for ourselves, and
know why we do a thing before we do it. We have that ingrained respect
for the individual conscience, which is at the bottom of all free
institutions. Some years before the War, an intelligent and cultivated
Austrian who had lived long in England, was asked for his opinion of
the British. “In many ways,” he said, “I think you are inferior to us;
but one great thing I have noticed about you which we have not. You
think and act and speak for yourselves.” If he had passed those years
in America instead of in England he must needs have pronounced the very
same judgment of Americans. Free speech, of course, like every form of
freedom, goes in danger of its life in war time. In 1917 an Englishman
in Russia came on a street meeting shortly after the first revolution
had begun. An Extremist was addressing the gathering and telling them
that they were fools to go on fighting, that they ought to refuse and
go home, and so forth. The crowd grew angry, and some soldiers were for
making a rush at him; but the Chairman, a big burly peasant, stopped
them with these words: “Brothers, you know that our country is now a
country of free speech. We must listen to this man, we must let him say
anything he will. But, brothers, when he’s finished, we’ll bash his
head in!”
I cannot assert that either Britons or Americans are incapable in times
like these of a similar interpretation of “free speech.” Things have
been done in my country, and perhaps in America, which should make us
blush. But so strong is the free instinct in both countries, that it
will survive even this War. Democracy, in fact, is a sham unless it
means the preservation and development of this instinct of thinking for
oneself throughout a people. “Government of the people by the people
for the people” means nothing unless the individuals of a people keep
their consciences unfettered, and think freely. Accustom the individual
to be nose-led and spoon-fed, and democracy is a mere pretence. The
measure of democracy is the measure of the freedom and sense of
individual responsibility in its humblest citizens. And democracy is
still in the evolutionary stage.
An English scientist, Dr. Spurrell, in a recent book, “Man and
his Forerunners,” thus diagnoses the growth of civilisations: A
civilisation begins with the enslavement by some hardy race of a
tame race living a tame life in more congenial natural surroundings.
It is built up on slavery, and attains its maximum vitality in
conditions little removed therefrom. Then, _as individual freedom
gradually grows_, disorganisation sets in and the civilisation slowly
dissolves away in anarchy. Dr. Spurrell does not dogmatise about
our present civilisation, but suggests that it will probably follow
the civilisations of the past into dissolution. I am not convinced
of that, because of certain factors new to the history of man.
Recent discoveries have so unified the world, that such old isolated
successful swoops of race on race are not now possible. In our great
Industrial States, it is true, a new form of slavery has arisen (the
enslavement of men by their machines), but it is hardly of the nature
on which the civilisations of the past were reared. Moreover, all
past civilisations have been more or less Southern, and subject to
the sapping influence of the sun. Modern civilisation is essentially
Northern. The individualism, however, which according to Dr. Spurrell,
dissolved the Empires of the past, exists already, in a marked degree,
in every modern State; and the problem before us is to discover
how democracy and liberty of the subject can be made into enduring
props rather than dissolvents. It is, in fact, the problem of making
democracy genuine. If that cannot be achieved and perpetuated, then I
agree there is nothing to prevent democracy drifting into an anarchism
which will dissolve modern States, till they are the prey of pouncing
Dictators, or of other States not so far gone in dissolution――the same
process in kind though different in degree from the old descents of
savage races on their tamer neighbours.
Ever since the substantial introduction of democracy, nearly a century
and a half ago with the American War of Independence, I would point out
that Western Civilisation has been living on two planes or levels――the
autocratic plane with which is bound up the idea of nationalism, and
the democratic, to which has become conjoined in some sort the idea
of internationalism. Not only little wars, but great wars such as
this, come because of inequality in growth, dissimilarity of political
institutions between States; because this State or that is basing its
life on different principles from its neighbours.
We fall into glib usage of words like democracy, and make fetiches
of them without due understanding. Democracy is certainly inferior
to autocracy from the aggressively national point of view; it is not
necessarily superior to autocracy as a guarantee of general well-being;
it might even turn out to be inferior unless we can improve it.
But democracy is the rising tide; it may be dammed or delayed but
cannot be stopped. It seems to be a law in human nature that where,
in any corporate society, the idea of self-government sets foot it
refuses ever to take that foot up again. State after State, copying
the American example, has adopted the democratic principle; and the
world’s face is that way set. Autocracy has, practically speaking,
vanished from the western world. It is my belief that only in a world
thus uniform in its principles of government, and freed from the
danger of pounce by autocracies, have States any chance to develop
the individual conscience to a point which shall make democracy proof
against anarchy, and themselves proof against dissolution; and only in
such a world can a League of Nations to enforce peace succeed.
But though we have now secured a single plane for Western civilisation
and ultimately, I hope, for the world, there will be but slow and
difficult progress in the lot of mankind. And for this progress the
solidarity of the English-speaking races is vital; for without that
there is but sand on which to build.
The ancestors of the American people sought a new country, because
they had in them a reverence for the individual conscience; they came
from Britain, the first large State in the Christian era to build
up the idea of political freedom. The instincts and ideals of our
two races have ever been the same. That great and lovable people
the French, with their clear thought and expression, and their quick
blood, have expressed those ideals more vividly than either of us.
But the phlegmatic tenacity of the English and the dry tenacity
of the American temperament have ever made our countries the most
settled and safe homes of the individual conscience. And we must look
to our two countries to guarantee its strength and activity. If we
English-speaking races quarrel and become disunited, civilisation will
split up again and go its way to ruin. The individual conscience is the
heart of democracy. Democracy is the new order; of the new order the
English-speaking nations are the ballast.
I don’t believe in formal alliances, or in grouping nations to exclude
and keep down other nations. Friendships between countries should have
the only true reality of common sentiment, _and be animated by desire
for the general welfare of mankind_. We need no formal bonds, but we
have a sacred charge in common, to let no petty matters, differences
of manner, divergencies of material interest, destroy our spiritual
agreement. Our pasts, our geographical positions, our temperaments
make us beyond all other races, the hope and trustees of mankind’s
advance along the only line now open――democratic internationalism. It
is childish to claim for Americans or Britons virtues beyond those of
other nations, or to believe in the superiority of one national culture
to another; they are different, that is all. It is by accident that
we find ourselves in this position of guardianship to the main line
of human development; no need to pat ourselves on the back about it.
But we are at a great and critical moment in the world’s history――how
critical, none of us alive will ever realise to the full. The
civilisation slowly built since the fall of Rome has either to break up
and dissolve into jagged and isolated fragments through a century of
revolutions and wars; or, unified and reanimated by a single idea, to
move forward on one plane and attain greater height and breadth.
Under the pressure of this War there has often been, beneath the
lip-service we pay to democracy, a disposition to lose faith in it,
because of its undoubted weakness and inconvenience in a struggle with
States autocratically governed; there has even been a sort of secret
reaction towards autocracy. On those lines there is no way out of a
future of bitter rivalries, chicanery, and wars, and the probable total
failure of our civilisation. The only cure which I can see, lies in
democratising the whole world, and removing the present weaknesses and
shams of democracy by education of the individual conscience in every
country. Goodbye to that chance, if Americans and Britons fall foul of
each other, refuse to make common cause of their thoughts and hopes,
and to keep the general welfare of mankind in view. They have got to
stand together, not in aggressive and jealous policies, but in defence
and championship of the self-helpful, self-governing, ‘live and let
live’ philosophy of life.
Who would not desire, rushing through the thick dark of the future, to
stand on the cliffs of vision――two hundred years, say――hence――and view
this world?
Will there then be this League for War, this caldron where, beneath
the thin crust, a boiling lava bubbles, and at any minute may break
through and leap up, as of late, jet high? Will there still be reek and
desolation, and man at the mercy of the machines he has made; still
be narrow national policies and rancours, and such mutual fear, that
no country dare be generous? Or will there be over the whole world
something of the glamour that each one of us now sees hovering over his
own country; and men and women――all――feel they are natives of one land?
Who dare say?
The guns have ceased fire and all is still; from the woods and fields
and seas, from the skeleton towns of ravaged countries the wistful dead
rise, and with their eyes question us. In this hour we have for answer
only this: We fought for a better Future for Mankind!
Did we? Do we? That is the great question. Is our gaze really fixed on
the far horizon? Or do we only dream it; and have the slain no comfort
in their untimely darkness; the maimed, the ruined, the bereaved, no
shred of consolation? Is it all to be for nothing but the salving of
national prides? And shall the Ironic Spirit fill the whole world with
his laughter?
The House of the Future is always dark. There are few cornerstones to
be discerned in the Temple of our Fate. But, of these few, one is the
brotherhood and bond of the English-speaking races; not for narrow
purposes, but that mankind may yet see Faith and Good Will enshrined,
yet breathe a sweeter air, and know a life where Beauty passes, with
the sun on her wings.
We want in the lives of men a “Song of Honour,” as in Ralph Hodgson’s
poem:
“The song of men all sorts and kinds
As many tempers, moods and minds
As leaves are on a tree,
As many faiths and castes and creeds
As many human bloods and breeds
As in the world may be.”
In the making of that song the English-speaking races will assuredly
unite. What set this world in motion we know not; the Principle of
Life is inscrutable and will for ever be; but we do know, that Earth
is yet on the upgrade of existence, the mountain top of man’s life not
reached, that many centuries of growth are yet in front of us before
Time begins to chill this planet, till it swims, at last, another
moon, in space. In the climb to that mountain top, of a happy life
for mankind, our two great nations are as guides who go before, roped
together in perilous ascent. On their nerve, loyalty, and wisdom, the
adventure now hangs. What American or British knife would sever the
rope?
He who ever gives a thought to the life of man at large, to his
miseries, and disappointments, to the waste and cruelty of existence,
will remember that if American or Briton fail in this climb, there can
but be for us both, and for all other peoples, a hideous slip, a swift
and fearful fall into an abyss, whence all shall be to begin over again.
We shall not fail――neither ourselves, nor each other. Our comradeship
will endure.
III
FROM A SPEECH AT THE LOTUS CLUB, NEW YORK